So it shouldn’t have surprised me to learn that
we had pretty shaky ideas of the human body and reproduction for centuries, and
those ideas in turn shaped a poor philosophical understanding of the soul and
body and sex.
Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the human ovum,
one of the largest cells in the human body, in 1827. Further, the fusion of
spermatozoa with ova was first observed in 1876. That’s incredibly recent in
the timeline of mammals reproducing. So, if we didn’t know how babies were made
(other than cause/effect observation), it shouldn’t be that surprising that there
were some pretty bad ideas around the “miracle” of birth.
In studying Aquinas, there are some pretty
cringe, sexist ideas. But Aquinas and other medieval Catholic scholars were
actually pretty egalitarian compared to the Greek thinkers they were studying. Oh,
they still held sexist ideas of the female body and female position, but at
least they thought her soul equal. And when I learned more about the poor
understanding of anatomy and biology that pervaded Western science for a few
thousand years, I can at least understand where their sexist view developed and
seemed so “scientifically proven” to them.
The ancient Greek physician Aristaeus believed
the uterus wandered about the female body; essentially, the uterus was a separate
creature that woman just carried around. He thought its moving, hitting against
the spleen and liver, could cause illness, and that it could be drawn back down
near the vagina but placing pleasant scents near the vagina (although the
actual term vagina didn’t exist until the 1680s). Even up through the 1800s was
the idea that the uterus might shift and float in the woman’s body, causing distress
or “hysteria,” named such from the Greek word for uterus.
Galen, a Greek physician and philosopher, believed
in the “one sex model.” This posited that there is set of sex organs, and the
different sexes are determined on if the sex organs are larger and on the
outside of the body (man) or smaller and on the inside (woman). Because woman
had the smaller organs, then it was assumed she was an underdeveloped man;
thus, females were physically inferior to men, who were the full development of
human.
[As an aside, men were always referred to as
hotter than women, who were referred to as cold. Yet, scientifically, this is
the exact opposite of their genital placement and purpose. Men’s testes are on
the outside of the body to keep sperm cooler, while women’s wombs serve as warm
incubators for babies.]
As Christian philosophers began studying man
and woman, they had this scientific understanding of the sexes, yet they also
had the Old Testament accounts of creation and the records of Christ’s
teachings. St. Augustine taught that man and woman were created equal and that
God’s grace fell on man and woman equally. He cited that Eve was created from
Adam’s rib, his side, not his feet (inferior position) or his head (superior
position). Man and woman were created to walk beside one another. However, St.
Augustine also believed that as part of Eve’s punishment in the Fall, woman
would be subject to her husband and be man’s inferior. This is a shift from the
Greeks. Woman is supposed to be equal, and will be some day, but can’t
be now because of the Fall.
Aquinas goes on to clarify that woman is a
fully rationalized soul and has human intellect. As such, she is made in the
image of God. For it is our intellect and our immortal soul that makes us
made in the image of God, not in literally having a male form. He also states
that husband and wife should share the “greatest friendship,” and have equal,
though differing, roles in the marriage. He does make the argument that every
institution needs one head that since the man is the “more rational” of the
two, then the head of the family should be the husband. He doesn’t really have
a basis for this assumption that it is always the man who is the more rational
of the partners, other than cultural bias and the continued bad science of man
being the physically more developed.
Further, menstruation was pretty much treated
as some baffling woman problem that male physicians didn’t write much about. It
was sort of related to the lunar cycles, through in many periods of history,
due to illness, frequent pregnancy, and malnutrition, women didn’t have consistent
periods. Popular opinions was that it was the female body detoxifying or
regulating itself, even a form of cooling the body (because females are cold
compared to men who are warm, remember). And when you don’t know the ovum
exists, ovulation cycles don’t make much sense. Menstruation was finally linked
to ovulation in 1831.
That something so basic as menstruation took so
long to be understood baffles me. It was explained to me at nine or ten enough that
it made sense. I’ve lived it out every month for 21 years, knowing that my body
has eggs to be fertilized or is building up then shedding uterine lining in
anticipation of hosting a child. How did these most brilliant minds not know
for centuries? Part of me is angry and says that it’s because men were running
things and that if women had, we would have had this figured out far sooner.
But another part of me understands that almost all our “basic” science is
fairly recent, and there’s only so much you can figure out before the invention
of the microscope and other technology to aid research.
And I have no doubt that more research will be
done and that 200 years from now, people will look back baffled at our bad conclusions
drawn from poor science. We do science in an effort to understand God and his
creation, including ourselves. Each discovery reveals more. But sometimes we
don’t know enough yet, not as much as we think we do, and we draw very bad,
harmful conclusions. It was thought that women were “less developed” than men,
that they inherently, scientifically, were inferior. How much harm and pain and
subjugation have men committed against women over millennia because of this?
How much self-hatred and envy and bitterness have women put themselves through
over this? It pains me to even think about it; some men were just cruel and
sexists, but I think many more just sincerely believed in this inherent superiority
that didn’t really exist.
Science now aligns with theology on the issue:
man and woman were create equally and compatibly. While the woman is receptive in
the reproductive act, she is not passive; she contributes an equal amount of
DNA, and it is her body (not some roaming uterus creature) that grows and
carries the child.
In his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem,
St. John Paul II refutes the idea that the domination over women is inevitable
because of the Fall. Rather, if it is a result of the Fall, then it is clearly
not how things should be, and we should be striving toward God and his perfect
will for us:
“When we read in the biblical description the
words addressed to the woman: ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he
shall rule over you’ (Gen 3:16), we discover a
break and a constant threat precisely in regard to this ‘unity of the two’
which corresponds to the dignity of the image and likeness of God in both of
them. But this threat is more serious for the woman, since domination takes the
place of ‘being a sincere gift’ and therefore living ‘for’ the other: ‘he shall
rule over you’. This ‘domination’ indicates the disturbance and loss of
the stability of that fundamental equality which the
man and the woman possess in the ‘unity of the two’: and this is especially to
the disadvantage of the woman, whereas only the equality resulting from their
dignity as persons can give to their mutual relationship the character of an
authentic ‘communio personarum’.”
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